Country lawyer

[2] Historically, such an attorney may have been more likely to have joined the bar by reading law rather than attending school, and in modern times may have (or may be assumed to have) graduated from a lower tier legal program.

[3] The term may also be used to describe a person who at one time practiced law in a humble setting, and later went on to do other things but (presumably) remained influenced by the country lawyer experience in later life and work.

[4] In contrast, a city lawyer or big city lawyer would work in an urban area, one of many thousands of other attorneys specializing in a single practice area, possibly the graduate of an expensive and prestigious law school and the member of a law firm, potentially responsible to corporate clients whom she has never met in person, and, like most urban denizens, not personally acquainted with most of the other people living nearby.

According to Francis Lyman Windolph in his 1938 book The Country Lawyer, the term turns more on the general nature of the attorney's practice than on the locality in which he practices: Now the true test of the country lawyer is not the size or importance of the community in which he does his work, but rather the sort of work which he does and the sort of people for whom he does it. ...

[5]Robert H. Jackson offered his own description in his 1950 essay "The County-Seat Lawyer", focusing both on the attorney's education and social values: He "read law" in the Commentaries of Blackstone and Kent and not by the case system.